Politics, Identity
Politics, Identity
IDENTITY-BASED AND PROGRESSIVE
Identity politics is a term that first came into usage in the 1970s to refer to the view that social identities, such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, have an important influence on an individual’s political motivations, affiliations, and political commitments. The term quickly moved from a neutral description to primarily a pejorative and began to refer to the practices of narrow interest-group politics, separatism, and the practice of assessing a person’s politics on the basis of his or her identity alone. In the 1990s both the concept and the practice of identity politics began to be vigorously defended primarily by theorists working on identity-based political movements or movements against identity-based forms of oppression.
Most consider the locus classicus of the concept of identity politics to be the Combahee River Collective Statement written in 1978. The term had been used in public discourse in the Left before this time, but this was the first place that it received an explicit formulation. In this statement, identity politics refers to the idea that the identity of political agents and theorists will have an impact on both the political work they choose to pursue and also on its effectiveness.
The Combahee River Collective was composed of African American women who believed that there did not yet exist a social theory or political movement that fully and accurately reflected the conditions of African American women’s lives. They argued that African American women needed to develop such a theory and movement themselves, that they would be the group most motivated to do so, and that they would be the group with the knowledge base from which to develop the specific social analyses applicable to their form of intersectional oppression. They made a specific point of stating that they were not separatists and in fact supported coalition work, particularly with those in the feminist and antiracist movements. They also stated that they did not reject the utility of more general social theories of oppression, such as Marxism. Yet they held that a special focus on black women’s lives by black women themselves was necessary to yield new insights and practices. Their defense of this latter claim was based on the state of the social movements of that time, in which the specific oppression of African American women was not pursued by either feminism in general or by the antiracist movements.
The concept of identity assumed by the Combahee River Collective was an intersectional and complex one. They did not assume that all women or all African Americans have the same political motivations or goals, hence their formation of this separate group. Many members also were lesbians and experienced marginalization as well as homophobia in other groups. Despite their experience with the complexities of group identity, they nonetheless asserted that “we believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression” (Combahee River Collective 1978, p. 365).
From this rather careful and cautious explanation of the relationship between identity and politics—a relationship conceived of as philosophical as well as political—the term identity politics began to be associated with the identity-based splits and sectarianism that rippled throughout the civil rights, gay and lesbian, women’s, and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Most notably this included the removal of whites from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that occurred in the mid-1960s and the gay-straight split that occurred in the women’s movement in the early 1970s. Splitting organizations along identity lines was attributed to identity politics. This connotation of the term may already have been in circulation when the Combahee River Collective first formed, motivating them to give an explanation and defense of the identity-based form their collective took.
CRITICS OF IDENTITY POLITICS
From the 1980s on both liberal and left political theorists began to critique the concept as based on simplistic notions of identity and narrow conceptions of solidarity and as maintaining a focus on victimization rather than on effective solutions. These theorists argued that identity politics was an obstacle to the work of creating trust across differences of identity, which is necessary for coalitions and class-based movements. They argued further that it had detrimental effects within identity defined groups themselves, such as enforced conformism within the group, a policing of the group’s boundaries, and a hampering of the expression of and debate over internal political differences within groups.
Leading liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. criticized identity politics for making a cult of identity that derailed the trend that had been growing up until the 1960s toward a melting-pot society. Other liberals also worried that identity politics in a multiethnic society would disable democracy by transforming the arena of public political discourse from a shared concern over the common good to a negotiation between interest groups locked in battle. Liberals also predicted that identity politics would lead to a Balkanization of the political landscape and an increase in civil strife, possibly including the kind of violence that occurred in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Leftists expressed the concern that identity politics had derailed the possibility of forming a class-based progressive movement that could unite around critical issues of economic injustice. Race- and gender-based movements are multi-class, they argued, and so cannot take up a working-class agenda. Many philosophers also entered the debate, especially those influenced by French post-structuralism, to argue that the concept of identity being assumed by proponents of identity politics is an illusion of coherence and unity based perhaps on a form of psychological pathology. Identity concepts assume a homogeneity of experience and political interests where none exists, and this is why identity-based movements must enforce homogeneity and police the borders around identities to keep out those with intersectional identities who might have a different set of political priorities. Some ethnic theorists, such as Paul Gilroy, united with this critique, arguing that identity politics is an understandable but pointless reaction to modernist pressures that transform identities and diminish their significance.
IDENTITY-BASED AND PROGRESSIVE
In response to these concerns a number of theorists, especially in ethnic studies, argue that identity-based political movements—such as the abolitionist movement and civil rights movement—have been among the main forces expanding democratization and developing progressive politics. Identity-based movements have improved the inclusiveness of class-based movements so that the interests of nonwhite and women workers are also represented. The white male union leaders would not have come to these more inclusive agendas on their own without being pushed by the various caucus groups within the labor movement that were organized around identity. Identity politics was a necessary part of the strategy to overcome identity-based forms of oppression, to ensure an inclusive political agenda, to develop a more thorough analysis of social oppression, and to show the equality of all people as leaders and intellectuals.
A number of ethnographic studies reveal that identity politics do not always lead to separatism or enforced conformity and that we need to develop a typology of identity-based movements in order to distinguish between different forms with different effects. Mobilizing on the basis of identity can bring new actors to political participation and thus work against the passivity of victimized notions of identity. Under extreme repression, identity groups may curtail the expression of internal differences, but this is not inherent to identity-based movements.
The concepts of identity assumed by the parties to this debate vary widely. Some theorists on both sides of the debate assume that identities are like interest groups with uniform political interests or that members of identity groups are identifiable by their shared practices, preferences, and beliefs. Other theorists, such as Satya P. Mohanty, Paula M. L. Moya, and Linda Martín Alcoff, argue that identities are historically fluid, intersectional, and heterogeneous and thus a starting place rather than the endpoint of politics. Nonetheless, identities are important indices of experience and provide epistemic resources for social analysis.
SEE ALSO African Americans; Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Class; Democracy; Ethnicity; Gender; Gender Gap; Identity; Individualism; Liberalism; Poststructuralism; Race; Sexual Orientation, Social and Economic Consequences; Social Movements; Women’s Movement
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Linda Martín Alcoff